Over the weekend Stanislav Malyshevasked a question on the StackExchange.com Programmers section as an open request to all of those working with PHP - what features would you like to have in PHP?

Since it's the holiday season now and everybody's making wishes, I wonder - which language features you would wish PHP would have added? I am interested in some practical suggestions/wishes for the language.

By practical he meant something that's possible, something that doesn't make PHP "not PHP", a change that would require breaking existing code and something that doesn't change the language or some "interesting aspect" of it. There's some interesting responses ranging from the completely coherent out to some ranty things like "I wish PHP was designed properly". Handy things like named parameters, dereferencing, syntax tweaks to make things more readable, unicode support and lots, lots more. Take a look at the full post and maybe contribute your own if you have some great ideas.